Strathclyde Student PDP Project 1

4c Design has partnered with Strathclyde University to provide a project for 4th and 5th year students for one academic year. The given course is entitled Product Development Partnership aka PDP and gives students a taste of becoming a “mini-consultancy”. As a fully fledged and successful consultancy we felt we were well placed to provide students with this experience. Over the coming year the students will Blog their progress and we encourage your feedback.

The brief and work to date is highlighted below in the students first 4c Blog Post…

I’m Craig, and I’m studying Product Design and Innovation BSc (Hons) at the University of Strathclyde. I’ve always had a keen interest in making things better and I get quite annoyed when something doesn’t work as well as it could. Along with my interest in tangible products I am interested in graphic design.Twitter – @carrigan_cc

Hi, I’m Gordon, a 4th year BSc (Hons) Product Design and Innovation student from the University of Strathclyde. I’ve always been interested in problem solving and making the wild ideas in my head a physical reality. I’m enjoying working with 4c Design, and can’t wait to get stuck in to prototyping our ideas.

Hi, my name is David. I’m 23, and I am in the final year of Product Design and Innovation BSc (Hons) at the University of Strathclyde. I have a strong interest in interaction design and inclusive design, which I believe shows through in any work I have produced. I am looking forward to becoming a big kid again in this project. I’m looking forward to producing a lot of interesting prototypes to play around with.

Problem

In schools across Scotland children in S1 and S2 are given a taste of all the subjects that the school has to offer for their Standard Grades. Obviously, with kids being kids, they tend to have a preference for interactive activities, over the theoretical ones; such as Art and Design over Science. This is all well and good, but with children losing interest in Science and Engineering, development in these fields is sure to suffer.

Brief

Due to this need we aim to design a resource kit, costing no more than £200, containing five or more competitive challenges, which utilises the modular resources provided in combination with everyday classroom items. The goal is to excite scientific and engineering skills, and to put it in a fun and engaging context.

Research

We visited the Glasgow Science Centre in order to experience first hand the types of interactive kits that get children interested is science. Not only were we lucky enough to get to play with all these cool experiments, but we were also surrounded by loads of kids. This allowed us to observe how they interacted with the kits and what experiments were most popular.

We’ve been looking at things such as the Bloodhound CCS – a project to smash the land speed record. It may seem like the main goal of this project is to break a world record, but really it’s to inspire children in exactly the same manner that NASA’s success did in 1969. The Tree of Knowledge programme has also stood out as an important aspect. This provides an educational motivation resource, aimed at both pupils and teachers.